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LUG Meetings

Meet up with Montana Linux people on IRC. We currently gather at the #ubuntu-montana room on the freenode network. Stop in and say "hello" or even ask/answer some questions. Don't have to be a Ubuntu user either. Or use the web-based chat client.

BillingsLUG
The BillingsLUG hasn't had a meeting in a while but they are hoping to start back up real soon. Really.

BozemanLUG
The BozemanLUG meets on the FIRST Thursday of the month at 7PM

MSU-Bozeman
EPS Building, Rm 259
Bozeman, MT
Used to be the LAST Thursday, but we changed it.

Cool Gear

BozemanLUG January 2008 Meeting Notes

Wow, great meeting this evening. Jeffrey Sharkey and Justin Krohn gave a presentation on MythTV and the HDHomeRun networked HD tuner. Ten people turned out for the meeting.

First Jeff gave us the history of MythTV, a feature overview, and then he compared it to other DVR software packages that are available. He explained the frontend software and the backend software... and how they didn't have to be on the same machine. He also discussed the TV listing providers.

Justin showed MythTV in operation (both the fancy GUI frontend and the web-based version) and shared some of his recent recordings made using his HDHomeRun network tuner. He mainly uses his setup with broadcast HD and reviewed all of the sources of HD content available in the Bozeman area. I was surprised at the number and high quality of the broadcast channels available although it was pointed out that one needs a good antenna.

Justin gave a complete overview of the HDHomeRun device, how well it works with MythTV and other software and said that he was very happy with the device.

Justin gave a good overview of all of the related signal types and showed that broadcast HD includes a lot of information embedded within the signal. He had to wonder around the building with his laptop and the HDHomeRun device before he was able to find a good broadcast signal... as the EPS building is pretty good at blocking them. He was able to demonstrate broadcast HDTV on his laptop with VLC and it looked fantastic.

You can put in your own FFMPEG user command and do the transcoding automatically. The problem I had with this method was that the audio and video occasionally got out of sync and I had to use Avidemux to re-adjust the timing on movies that I wanted to keep. Obviously something wrong with my command that I have been unable to figure out as of yet. I've been playing with WinFF (an FFMPEG front-end) on my Fedora box and it works pretty well although slowly for the conversion to MP4 for my iPod Touch.

I'm not running MythTV (yet) but I believe it uses mpeg or mpeg2 as its native file format. In some cases, it might depend on the format provided by your video device.

For example, the HDHomeRun provides digital video streams in their native format... so no encoding is done. For people who are grabbing analog signals and then encoding them to digital format, I would think they have some control over the desired format.